Guide · Learn & practiceSpatial · 2 min read

How to play
Peg Solitaire

Keep pegs connected enough to help remove one another. The shortest-looking local move can strand a distant peg for the rest of the puzzle.

Your first round

  1. Start on Easy and identify edge pegs that will need a route back toward the center.
  2. Select a peg to inspect the highlighted legal destinations.
  3. Before jumping, check whether the remaining nearby pegs will still have useful jumps.
  4. When only a few pegs remain, plan the final two or three jumps backward from a single-peg finish.

Worked example

Make the idea concrete

Read a legal jump

In a horizontal sequence peg, peg, empty, select the first peg and then the empty third hole. The first peg lands in the third hole and the middle peg disappears. The sequence becomes empty, empty, peg.

Build your strategy

  • Bring outer pegs into useful combinations before clearing all their neighbors.
  • Preserve a peg that can serve as the middle of a later jump instead of removing it automatically.
  • Undo to the decision that caused isolation, which may be several jumps before the dead end.

Common mistakes

  • Jumping simply because a move is legal, without checking the remaining connections.
  • Leaving two distant pegs with no way for either to jump over the other.

Try this next

Solve an 8-peg position and describe how each outer peg was removed. Then try a center finish before adding more pegs.

Play Peg Solitaire ↗
Keep exploring

Another puzzle, another perspective.

Explore a related game, or return to the library to choose your next challenge.

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